This book explores how public commentary framed Australian involvement in the Waikato War (1863-64), the Sudan crisis (1885), and the South African War (1899-1902), a succession of conflicts that reverberated around the British Empire and which the newspaper press reported at length. It reconstructs the ways these conflicts were understood and reflected in the colonial and British press, and how commentators responded to the shifting circumstances that shaped the mood of their coverage. Studying each conflict in turn, the book explores the expressions of feeling that arose within and between the Australian colonies and Britain. It argues that settler and imperial narratives required constant defending and maintaining. This process led to tensions between Britain and the colonies, and also to vivid displays of mutual affection. The book examines how war narratives merged with ideas of territorial ownership and productivity, racial anxieties, self-governance, and foundational violence. In doing so it draws out the rationales and emotions that both fortified and unsettled settler societies.

“Settlers, War, and Empire in the Press deftly explores a long sequence of debates over the nature of empire, the consequences of colonialism, and the boundaries of community triggered by wars on the frontiers of empire. It offers a compelling reading of the centrality of newspapers in the culture of the Victorian empire, reconstructing the operation of a vigorous, expansive and often fractious imperial public sphere in an age of recurrent colonial conflicts.” (Tony Ballantyne, Professor of History, University of Otago, New Zealand)

“In its detailed exploration of settler discourses, anxieties, emotions, and enthusiasms, set alongside British newspaper coverage of Britain’s settler colonies, and a broader structural account of settler colonialism, this book builds on existing scholarship and breaks new ground.” (Ann Curthoys, Emeritus Professor, Australian National University, Australia)

“In this masterly study of martial enthusiasm (and anxiety) in the High Imperial era, Hutchinson lays bare the instrumental role of the press in imperial social formations. His insightful analysis of British and Australian newspapers pushes war outside the narrow boundaries of military history and into the heart of our understanding of these societies.” (Kirsten McKenzie, Professor of History, University of Sydney)

“This book not only informs us about Australian perspectives on imperial wars, it also enhances our understanding of the imperial press system as one of the cornerstones of the British Empire as a whole.” (Alan Lester, Professor of Historical Geography, University of Sussex, UK, and Research Professor in History, La Trobe University, Australia)

“This timely and ambitious book re-examines settler press accounts of noted British Empire wars: highly charged events to bring to bear historical and theoretical analyses of settler colonialism and print culture. This is the best kind of postcolonial cultural studies: rigorous in its archival depth, demanding in its argumentative reach, and theoretically sophisticated. Language and material power, print and feelings, the quotidian and the epic, the national and the global: each are brought together in productive tension in Hutchinson’s insightful analysis.” (Anna Johnston, Associate Professor, ARC Future Fellow, Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland, Australia)